Fresh off a tirade encouraging Donald Trump to stonewall Democratic subpoenas, Lindsey Graham kicked off William Barr’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday by rehashing the Hillary Clinton e-mail controversy, a matter settled by the F.B.I. close to three years ago now, and vowing to probe the origins of the investigation into the president and his campaign. “When the Mueller report is put to bed, and it soon will be,” Graham said in his grating opening remarks, “this committee is going to look long and hard at how this all started.”

At one point, Graham went full-on conspiracy crank, alleging the Clinton team went to great lengths to dispose of pertinent evidence. “There was a protective order for the server issued by the House and there was a request by the State Department to preserve all the information on the server,” he said. “Paul Combetta, after having the protective order, used a software program called BleachBit to wipe this email server clean . . . Eighteen devices possessed by Secretary Clinton she used to do business as secretary. How many of them were turned over to the F.B.I.? None. Two of them could be turned over because Judith Casper took a hammer and destroyed two of them. What happened to her? Nothing.” (Both the BleachBit and hammer-smashing theories are popular on the right.)

It was a familiar stance for Graham, whose public defenses of the president and his allies have at time left him beet red and gasping for breath. Barr’s appearance before the committee, it seemed, struck a similar nerve. Wednesday was Barr’s first appearance before Congress following the release of the redacted Mueller report, in which the special counsel did not establish that the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin in 2016, but described a pattern of behavior by the president that suggested he was attempting to strangle the investigation. Barr has been criticized for his handling of the probe, including by Mueller himself, who complained in a letter to Barr that his investigators’ work had been misrepresented in the four-page summary Barr submitted to lawmakers. “The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions,” Mueller wrote. “There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation.”

Democrats have used Mueller’s letter to raise a fresh round of questions about Barr’s motivations. But Graham, one of Trump’s most obnoxious advocates on the Hill, echoed the president’s talking points about the probe, as well as his insistence that it was actually Clinton and the Democrats who committed crimes. The South Carolina Senator said in his opening statement Wednesday that there was “no collusion, no coordination, no conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government”—which isn’t quite what Mueller said in his report. While the special counsel does acknowledge that his team didn’t find evidence of a conspiracy, he says at one point that investigators faced limitations in conducting their work and that the “Office cannot rule out the possibility that the unavailable information would shed additional light on (or cast in a new light) the events described in the report.” In short, investigators not finding evidence of collusion is not the same as there not having been any collusion, as Barr, Trump, and Graham claim. Graham continued Wednesday that because “there was no underlying crime,” there could be no obstruction—leaving out the possibility that obstructive behavior by the president and those around him, if successful, would have made it impossible to find evidence of such a crime.

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Of course, Graham’s opening statement was largely political, meant to provide cover for a president whose apparent abuses of power were painstakingly catalogued by the special counsel. As such, it wasn’t enough to merely defend the president—Graham also parroted Trump’s attacks on investigators and sought to re-litigate the Clinton e-mail controversy. He lashed out at Peter Strzok, an F.B.I. agent leading the Clinton probe who expressed opposition to Trump in text messages, saying that Strzok “hated Mr. Trump’s guts”—and reading through some of the texts to prove it. He also vowed, as Trump and Barr have, to look into the origins of the Russia probe, including what he suggested were surveillance abuses by the F.B.I. and Department of Justice.

“The bottom line is, we’re about to hear from Mr. Barr, the results of a two year investigation into the Trump campaign, all things Russia, the actions the president took before and after the campaign, $25 million, 40 F.B.I. agents,” Graham said. “I appreciate very much what Mr. Mueller did for the country. I have read most of the report. For me, it is over.”